It’s easy imagining that a collaboration between members of Einstürzende Neubauten and the Jesus Lizard might fall somewhere on the harrowing end of the spectrum. Each of those outfits, in its own way, made a name for itself by pulverizing the syntax of rock—Neubauten using brain and sinew, the Lizard using gonad and intestine—and constructing something singularly unsettling in its place. But The Unsemble, the eponymous debut album by a trio comprising Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten and Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard (along with past Silver Jews drummer Brian Kotzur), is not the logical output of such an equation. Neither industrial nor pigfuck, it’s a refined, even contemplative assemblage of instrumental art-rock with a marked lack of shit getting bashed.
Not that The Unsemble is strictly background music—or rather, it is background music, even though it wallpapers a speculative tableau in which nebulous perception and queasy surreality are the norm. In spite of Hacke and Denison being the big names here, the album feels more like a collaboration between Hacke and Kotzur, seeing as how they’ve each done film work before (Hacke as a soundtrack composer for Uli M Schueppel and Kotzur as an actor in Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers). That cinematic envisioning of the Unsemble’s essential mission—which otherwise appears to be little more than an ad hoc, let’s-book-two-weeks-in-the-studio-and-see-what-happens arrangement—is most vivid on the track “Act 3". Hacke’s boiled-in-oil bass line actually sounds more like the Jesus Lizard’s low-end from the axe of David Wm. Sims, all grease and grunts and grated knuckles—but in Hacke’s hands the twang is rolled off the top, leaving just the raspy, prog-punk chug. Kotzur subdivides the syncopation, leaving Denison to bob above that tight helix of rhythm, towing a wispy chemtrail of guitar.
As imagistic as much of The Unsemble is, it’s short on emotion—which in this case is preferable, seeing as how the album’s mix of composition and improvisation gives these visceral players a welcome cerebral pretext. The drawback being, it’s also short on mood. A vague aura of detachment is about the only atmosphere it can muster, and even that, maybe aptly, never fully coheres. These guys are listening to each other, but they’re not exactly vibing. “Chaingang”—another score in search of a scene—shoots for menace but ends up almost comical, as its literal chain-rattling not only makes a self-parody of the title, but a self-parody of Hacke’s found-object legacy with Neubauten. In one sense it’s a welcome nod to an approach that Hacke, of all people, can lay almost full claim to; on the other, it partly defeats the purpose of seeing what new directions this convocation can yank itself in. And the five improvised tracks—“Improv 1”, “Improv 2”, etc.—don’t congeal until “4”, where a tentative, chamber-jazz crawl turns simultaneously skeletal and sinuous, leaving an afterimage of weird worlds in the distance while tapping into an earthy, nearly shamanic pulse.
The most rewarding, yet most frustrating, experiments on The Unsemble are the songs that rock hardest. Along with “Act 3”, the tracks “Shadows” and “Circles Revisited” feature teeming, lurching bass-and-guitar paired with an intricate percussive thump. They move, but they also leave little to the imagination—which is where the strength of “Waves” and “Voices”, in all their empty, drifting prettiness, lies. “Neon”, however, is the album’s head-and-shoulders highlight—a Goblin-esque throb of spectral, synthetic delicacy laced with cascading arpeggios and a gentle gravitas—that once again accentuates the cinematic nature of the collaboration. But it’s telling that the Unsemble grip hardest when they’re hewing closely to their inspirations—as well as the bands from which they sprang.
